The present invention relates to power supply and cooling technologies, and more particularly to a power supply technology which is applied to semiconductor integrated circuits.
In the design of LSIs, it has become very critical to take the amount of heat generation into account as a performance limit of the chip as semiconductor manufacturers move their manufacturing processes to increasingly finer design rules and achieve significantly larger packing densities. At high temperatures, the chip will malfunction or suffer from degradation in long-term reliability. Accordingly, various measures are taken against heat generation. For example, a heat sink is provided on the upper portion of a chip to liberate the heat generated from the chip.
Recent LSIs, particularly high-performance microprocessors, may generate heat that cannot be dissipated by the heat sink. It is thus an everlasting challenge to improve the efficiency of heat dissipation.
Additionally, there is also a problem that the density of an electric current flowing through a terminal of an LSI connected to a circuit board or the like may have an adverse effect on the reliability of the LSI because the terminal has a limited current capacity. Thus, the power supply to the LSI is also recognized as a critical technical issue.